Traditionally live casino card games, such as Baccarat and Twenty-One, use one or more decks of playing cards that are obtained from companies that manufacture the playing cards, bundle the playing cards together into a deck of playing cards and then seal the box holding the deck of playing cards. When the box of a deck of playing cards arrives at the gaming establishment, the box is traditionally first opened at the gaming table at which the cards are to be used.
The dealer, while being supervised by a floor person and casino video surveillance, extracts the deck of playing cards from the box, exposes all of the cards and checks to ensure a complete deck is present. The dealer then shuffles the deck of playing cards and then the play of the casino game may commence. Whenever the playing cards are changed, no play of the casino game occurs which lowers the casino revenue and annoys the players who have to wait for the new deck to be examined and shuffled. In games in which multiple decks of cards are used (such as 4, 6 or even 8 deck Twenty-One games), the delay can be quite significant.
It has been proposed to print only the cards that are actually needed for a particular deal of the casino game. U.S. Pat. No. 5,199,710 (Lamle) discloses a method and apparatus for supplying playing cards at random to a casino table. A printer is associated with a gaming table and whenever playing cards are needed at the gaming table, the dealer activates the printer which randomly selects a card by suit and rank from the remaining cards available and that card is printed and dispensed to the dealer location from which the card may be passed to the player.
A drawback to the Lamle invention is that it does not print an entire deck of cards, but only prints a card at a time as needed in the game being played.